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This will be one of those blogs that you might read and assume we are getting some sort of commission or spiff or freebie from Hotels.com in exchange for writing it. That is, according to the average dime-a-dozen travel blogger, one of the perks of being a glamorous, jet-setting travel blogger. Well, I guess I’m not one of those travel bloggers because we don’t exactly have big travel corporations knocking on our doors offering to give us free stuff in exchange for writing about their services. But let me make this very clear: if you are a big travel corporation and want to give us free stuff...

Above: a room at our hotel in Ljubljana, Slovenia back in January, 2016 Way back in primary school social sciences, I remember once having to memorize a list of humankind's basic necessities to sustain life. Shelter, food, and water were on the list. I don't remember the rest of this list, but nowadays I imagine it includes good bandwidth and Netflix. The one topic we invested the most research and thought into in regards to this nomadic lifestyle was lodging, a more comfortable euphemism for the first of that list, shelter. After all, we didn't imagine living under a lean-to of palm fronds...

An Interview With Kerry from ClueWagon.com Our regular readers know that, from time to time, we've taken advantage of our travels to pursue some ancestry research, like the month spent on the Spanish island of Ibiza in 2015. We haven't always had a consistent approach to our genealogy research, but our research discipline and methods have improved in the past few years. We can thank our friend and fellow blogger Kerry Scott over at ClueWagon.com for much of that: we've been trying to keep up with her blog since we discovered her a little over a year ago. Her blog is always informative and...

We’re getting restless. Our feet are itchy. Our passports have dust on them. But new plans are being made… We blinked and the last four months are gone. Our travels might not have been overly exciting since our last blog, but we haven’t exactly sat still. It’s been a summer full of new grandbaby, wedding preparation, some local and regional travel (including a couple of stateside house sits), more work than I’ve been used to in a while, dance lessons, and some occasional time for fun with friends, a couple of concerts (Jimmy Buffett, Phillip Phillips with Matt Nathanson), some ancestry...

The problem with travel is that, the more places we've seen, the more places we want to see. Travel is either addicting or the Creator keeps adding to the world. If you're reading this shortly after I've scheduled it to be published, then at this moment we are probably waiting in line to board the Queen Mary 2 for our ride home. This 7 months in Europe has been our longest stint yet, and it might be the last we will enjoy for a little while. Previously when asked how long we plan to do this "nomad thing", we've said at least until the grandchildren start showing up. Well, our first is...

The television phenomena "Downton Abbey" tells the story of changing times. The series, wildly popular in both the UK and America, follows the English aristocratic Crawley family through the early decades of the 20th century. Juxtaposed against pivotal historical events from the sinking of the Titanic through World War I and the Irish independence movement, the Crawley family must learn to adapt from an era of peerage and entitlement to face the realities of the modern era. The Titanic represents the aristocratic old ways, the Great War is the painful birth of the modern world, and Irish...

We spent a week in Glasgow in April. Having missed a visit to nearby Loch Lomond the last time we visited Glasgow in 2014, it was #1 on our list this time around. Also while in Glasgow this time, we picked up a new tradition known as "prosecco Fridays". It's a pretty simple matter of popping the cork on a bottle of prosecco every Friday. Thanks Gilly and Guillaume for our new "Scottish" tradition. So, dear reader, while you prepare for your own prosecco Friday, here are a few pictures of Scotland's Loch Lomond.

Title picture: St Paul's Cathedral, London Our interest in England's cathedrals began with a happenstance visit to the Carlisle Cathedral in 2014. It's a splendid, dramatic cathedral dating from the Norman era. But unlike St. Paul's in London and the cathedrals of Canterbury and Salisbury, we'd never heard of it, which left us wondering how many more grand cathedrals England has to offer. The answer to that question is 42. From the middle ages on, cathedral building has been a favorite English pastime (anyone who's read Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth knows this well). You can hardly turn...

We've often said that the pubs of London are one of the must-see attractions of Britain's capital. But do you plan your London time around visiting pubs? And if so, how do you select which pub (or pubs) to visit? The answer to the first question is easy: yes. Most definitely, yes. Going to London without going to a pub is like going to Paris and not seeing the Eiffel Tower or going to New York and not seeing the Statue of Liberty. London's pubs are a treasure of British culture. If you still have the misconception that a pub is the equivalent of an American bar, you're way off. A British pub...

We henceforth declare that whenever we visit Paris, we shall stay in Montmartre. We used to have another travel rule that every time we visited Europe we'd spend at least a few days in Paris. But after 3 visits in a row we started skipping stopovers in Paris. Eight years have passed and we now question the wisdom of our absence. We love Paris as much now and we did on our first visit. Paris is, in fact, a principle reason we are full time nomads now: on our first visit, we mused what it would be like to spend an entire year in Paris. That pipe dream evolved into our current location-...